This first tutorial is part of a series that I’m planning in order to show how to use Pentaho to build BI applications. The expected audience is people without previous knowledge about Pentaho, for this reason I decided to start from the very beginning. I think and hope that students or professional who want to step into BI will find these tutorials useful.

The renamed Pentaho Analytic Platform is the central component to host the content of our BI application. From the platform it is possible to run and show reports and dashboards, manage security, perform OLAP analysis and many other tasks.

All Pentaho software, except the Pentaho Mobile App, requires the Sun/Oracle version 1.7 distribution of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK), therefore is essential that Java is installed and at least the variable JRE_HOME or JAVA_HOME should be configured. I show how to set the JAVA_JOME system variable in a Windows environment.

As I mentioned in the first post of this series, the first step is to download the BA Server from:

Using the Marketplace plugin (comes with the default installation) it is possible to install other useful plugins, which are going to be used to design dashboards, perform OLAP analysis, etc.

Users and Roles

The default installation comes with a set of users and their respective directories. The users with the admin role can see all of the directories. There is also a “Public” folder, where the examples showed in the screencast above are stored.

Summary

The Pentaho Business Analytics Platform hosts Pentaho-created and user-created content. It is open source and could easily download and install. If you are a developer, specially a Java developer, I encourage you to dive and study how is build the whole platform, understand the architecture behind, and why not, to collaborate with the community.

In future posts I will examine in detail some important features and characteristics of the Server

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About Paul Hernandez

I'm an Electronic Engineer and Computer Science professional, specialized in Data Analysis and Business Intelligence Solutions. Also a father, swimmer and music lover.